CHARLES PRUSIK
______________________________________________________________________________
Rethinking Realism: A Critique of Georg Lukács
I. INTRODUCTION
The essays of Marxist critic Georg Lukács offer a difficult, often troublesome aesthetic reflection
on a specific moment in the history of modern literature. In ―The Ideology of Modernism,‖ 1
Lukács develops his position regarding the emergence of the so-called modernist school of
literary experimentation. In framing his critique, he appends his own position with the following
cautionary note: ―What must be avoided at all costs is the approach generally adopted by
bourgeois-modernist critics themselves: that exaggerated concern with formal criteria, with
questions of style and literary technique.‖2 Although such a strategy resembles an aesthetic
judgment, Lukács‘s critique is structured as an intervention into the ideological mystifications
that govern the formal criteria of modernist literature. According to Lukács, the aesthetic primacy
of the various modalities of form and style that characterizes the modernist doxa is nothing more
than ideological mystification; such an attempt to autonomize formal criteria is itself the product
of ideology. As Lukács insists, ―The distinctions that concern us are not those between stylistic
‗techniques‘ in the formalistic sense. It is the view of the world, the ideology or weltanschauung
underlying the writer‘s work that counts.‖3 In opposition to modernism, Lukács defends the
realist tradition of literature, particularly that embodied by the nineteenth century novel. Realism,
he argues, is a mode of literary engagement that is able to capture the true nature of the individual
in relation to the development of the socio-historical totality. In short, realism succeeds as an
aesthetic and a political strategy because it can penetrate the underlying essences that lie beneath
the appearances of a particular historical situation. In this paper, I will argue that Lukács‘s
position is inadequate because he fails to recognize the way in which the modes of literary
representation themselves are subject to aesthetic and historical transformation. As a
consequence, Lukács‘s defense of realism is only able to operate on the basis of a static and often
transparently dogmatic absolutization of the literary subject.
II. THE LIMITS OF MODERNISM
Although Lukács‘s critique of modernism is framed by the necessity of representing the truly
dialectical movement of history, his position nevertheless fails because he at once mistakes the
concretely historical forms of modernism for ahistorical abstractions and in the same operation he
transforms the dynamic, immanently variegated forms of realism into static forms of
transcendence. For Lukács, modern subjectivity is characterized by its condition as ―alienated,‖
―fragmented,‖ and ―solitary.‖ According to Lukács, the image of the modern subject dictated by
the modernists is an image of primary isolation: ―Man, for these [modernist] writers is by nature
solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human beings.‖4 The modern subject
is fundamentally divorced from the recognition of his/her socio-historical context. Drawing on
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Heidegger‘s notion of Geworfenheit (‗thrownness-into-being‘), Lukács suggests that such a
condition ―implies, not merely that man is constitutionally unable to establish relationships with
things or persons outside himself; but also that it is impossible to determine theoretically the
origin and goal of human existence.‖5 For Lukács, Heidegger‘s Geworfenheit is the dominant
image of the modern subject—through his/her ahistorical appearance, ―he is ‗thrown-into-theworld‘: meaninglessly, unfathomably. He does not develop through contact with the world; he
neither forms nor is formed by it.‖6 Such a view of the modern condition permeates the
ideological forms which determine the formal experimentations of modernist literature. Yet such
experiments never adequately represent the socio-historical character of humanity—the only
development captured by modernism is the aesthetic reiteration of the modern condition.
In an effort to critique the modernist doxa, Lukács proposes the following antithesis:
―Abstract potentiality belongs wholly to the realm of subjectivity; whereas concrete potentiality is
concerned with the dialectic between the individual‘s subjectivity and objective reality.‖7 The
necessity of such an opposition resides in the attempt to identify the emergence of modernism as
a symptom of the impossibility to negotiate, aesthetically, the difference between essence and
appearance. If the modern subject is to be represented as she truly is, then the dialectical
movement between her subjective and objective reality must be preserved. Concrete potentiality
maintains the literary subject in her actual socio-historical environment; it ―implies a description
of actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world.‖8 Abstract potentiality, by contrast,
represents an isolated, solipsistic, reified consciousness which has been cut-off from real social
conditions. The preservation of such a difference (between abstract and concrete potentiality), is
the condition of possibility for any accurate representation of the social totality. As Lukács insists:
―If the distinction between abstract and concrete potentiality vanishes, if man‘s inwardness is
identified with an abstract subjectivity, human personality must necessarily disintegrate.‖ 9 The
modernist doxa has eliminated the boundary between abstract and concrete potentiality—and the
subjectivity that it depicts is that of an internal, monadological, ahistorical condition humaine.
The elevation of abstract potentiality, i.e., the hypostatization of the modern subject in terms
of an ahistorical condition humaine, has reduced literary representation to a sequence of
―unrelated experiential fragments.‖10 The formal experiments that characterize this elevation of
abstract potentiality (e.g., the use of stream-of-consciousness, the interior monologue, as well as
allegory) are that which define modernists such as Joyce, Musil, Beckett, Kafka, etc., as
historically and aesthetically distinct from traditionally ―realistic‖ forms of literature. For Lukács,
the defining literary strategy of the modernists is the tendency to develop (and to overdevelop)
techniques of form. As Lukács writes in ―The Ideology of Modernism‖:
This state of affairs—which to my mind characterizes all modernist art of the past
fifty years—is disguised by critics who systematically glorify the modernist
movement. By concentrating on formal criteria, by isolating technique from
content and exaggerating its importance, these critics refrain from
judgment. . . .They are unable, in consequence, to make the aesthetic distinction
between realism and naturalism. This distinction depends on the presence or
absence in a work of art of a ‗hierarchy of significance‘ in the situations and
characters presented.11
Contra realism, modernism has dropped its ―selective principle.‖ This is to say that
modernism eliminates a sense of perspective, namely, the capacity to distinguish between the
important and the superficial within the contextual unity of a narrative. 12 Through the elimination
of perspective—and by extension, through the dissolution of concrete and abstract potentiality—
the inner world of the narrative subject is reduced to the fetishization of interiority, an interiority
that develops ―paradoxically, as it may seem—a static character.‖13 Such distortions index a
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distorted sense of perspective, a perspective that has stripped consciousness of the dynamism that
constitutes the tension between subjective and objective reality.
The tendency of modernist literature to elevate abstract potentiality is not only an aesthetic
failure insofar as it fails to capture the objectivity of real social conditions that situate the modern
subject, but it also fails to capture the internal form of consciousness qua isolated subject.
According to Lukács, the formal isolation of abstract potentiality implicitly accepts the reified,
ideological forms of modern life as real forms. In other words, modernism accepts appearance as
essence. As Lukács insists in ―Realism in the Balance‖:
The modern literary schools of the imperialist era, from Naturalism to
Surrealism, which have followed each other in such swift succession, all have
one feature in common. They all take reality exactly as it manifests itself to the
writer and the characters he creates. The form of this immediate manifestation
changes as society changes.14
The modulations of consciousness that structure the formal experimentations of the
modernists are merely so many reflections of surface alterations within the development of
society. This is to say that the innovations developed by Joyce, Musil, Beckett, Kafka, and many
others are merely epiphenomenal representations of idealized appearances. Such representations
fail to capture the underlying relations of the socio-historical totality that constitute the true nature
of the modern subject in his/her real, conditioned development. As Lukács writes, the modernists
―remain frozen in their own immediacy; they fail to pierce the surface to discover the underlying
essence, i.e., the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce
them.‖15 The anti-realist deviations of modernism have isolated abstract potentiality, and as a
consequence the monadological involutions of a fragmented consciousness are merely the
discursive play, tending towards dissolution, of an individually isolated experience.
III. THE DIALECTICAL UNITY OF REALISM
Lukács‘s attempt to jettison modernism is also coupled with the simultaneous attempt to defend
and legitimate traditional modes of realism. Lukács tends to valorize the classic novels of Balzac,
Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Zola.16 Through the breadth of their aesthetic vision, such authors
are said to unearth the underlying essences governing their world—the development of realism
means the development of the capacity to adequately represent the essential unfolding of the
socio-historical totality as an organic whole. According to Lukács‘s account:
Every major realist fashions the material given in his own experience, and in so
doing makes use of techniques of abstraction, among others. But his goal is to
penetrate the laws governing objective reality and to uncover the deeper, hidden,
mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make
up society.17
For Lukács, the leading defenders of modernism (Bloch, Brecht, Adorno, etc.), have failed in
their implicit over-identification of the distortions of internal subjectivity with reality itself.
Realism, by contrast, is able to recuperate the modern subject as a mediated subject—which is to
say, a subject constituted by the mystifications of ideology. The realist tradition attends itself to
the developing parts of society as they relate to the contradictory and often uneven development
of the socio-historical whole. Moreover, realism captures not ―an immediately obvious aspect of
reality but one which is permanent and objectively more significant, namely man in the whole
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range of his relations to the real world, above all those which outlast merest fashion.‖18 As an
aesthetic practice, literary realism endures because of its decidedly educative function insofar as it
presents distortion as distortion—realism overcomes the contradictory nature of the modern
subject not through the elevation of his/her alienated condition into a condition humaine, but
rather through situating the modern subject within the greater unity of the socio-historical whole.
However, the preservation of realism is necessarily predicated on a specific determination of
humanity. For Lukács, that determination is the Aristotelian hypostatization of humanity as ―zōon
politikon,‖19 man is a social animal. In order to adequately represent the condition of the modern
subject it is necessary to capture her in her sociality. As Lukács writes,
The literature of realism, based on the Aristotelian concept of man as zoon
politikon, is entitled to develop a new typology for each new phase in the
evolution of society. It displays the contradictions within society and within the
individual in the context of a dialectical unity.20
Temporally and historically situated, the literature of realism captures individual ―types‖ (e.g.,
Antigone, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, Julien Sorel, etc.),21 who express the underlying laws
governing social life. In accordance with the logical progression of Hegelianism, the individual
types of realist literature are never merely individuals—on the contrary, their individual being
(i.e., their Sein an sich in the Hegelian formulation), cannot be isolated or distinguished from
their social and historical environment. Realism captures the true depth of human individuality
precisely because it represents human individuality as concrete potentiality, i.e., the subject in its
dialectical relation to the unity of objective reality.
And yet, for all his dialectical pronouncements, Lukács‘s defense of realism nevertheless
effectuates an absolutization of concrete potentiality insofar as he reduces the literary subject to
an essentialized form, namely, to zoon politikon. Such a metaphysical recuperation of the human
essence eternalizes the immanently specific, conditioned forms of modern life. Lukács‘s
affirmation of universally enduring ―types‖ which are said to populate the landscape of Western
literature are themselves transcendental forms superimposed from an absolute sense of
―perspective.‖ Moreover, Lukács‘s castigation of ―formalism,‖ and his insistence on the necessity
of preserving the activity of concrete potentiality mistakes form for artifice. That is, Lukács‘s
denigration of ―formalism‖ is belied precisely by the way in which he conflates the activity of
concrete potentiality with the emergence of identifiably trans-historical types. The critique of
formalism is a critique of aesthetic superimposition—i.e., the modernist attempt to impose formal
elements on the organic unity of a work of literature is merely the result of the dissolution of
abstract and concrete potentiality. And yet, Lukács‘s own valorization of man as zōon politikon is
upheld as a formal dictum of enduring presence, a presence which governs the transformations of
literary content throughout the flow of time.
IV. MODERNISM RECONSIDERED
Given Lukács‘s critique of the modernist turn to ―form,‖ it is worth considering the meaning of
form vis-à-vis the immanent position of literary production. According to Lukács, the illusion of
modernism lies in the tendency to absolutize formal techniques over and above the specific
content governing form. In his critique of Joyce‘s Ulysses, for instance, Lukács identifies this
very strategy:
I refer to the fact that with Joyce the stream-of-consciousness technique is no
mere stylistic device; it is itself the formative principle governing the narrative
pattern and the presentation of character. Technique here is something absolute; it
is part and parcel of the aesthetic ambition informing Ulysses.22
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Undoubtedly, Joyce‘s development of stream-of-consciousness is more than a stylistic
flourish—it is immanent to the discursive structure of the work. But to say that technique is a
governing principle and therefore ―something absolute‖ is to conceal the precise methods and
strategies Joyce develops in order to establish an immanent world. The Joycean techniques of
stream-of-consciousness constitute the fabric of the literary world his characters inhabit—such
techniques are that which form the very immanent narrative patterns that they structure. 23
Although Lukács has criticized the modernist focalization on formal technique, his critique
coincides with the failure to address the ways in which modernist experimentation works
immanently with the objective function of formal elements, and instead insists that such elements
are reducible to symptoms of an ―over-inflated subjectivism.‖24
But if the question of form is a problem for modernism, surely it is also a problem for
realism. The strict relation of determination Lukács proposes—namely, that content determines
form— illuminates nothing about the aesthetic production of realistic literature. Indeed, as Brecht
insists, ―Since the artist is constantly occupied with formal matters, since he constantly forms,
one must define what one means by formalism carefully and practically, otherwise one conveys
nothing to the artist.‖25 For Brecht, formal techniques are always at play in aesthetic production—
he testifies to the fact that ―a formalistic quality insinuates itself even into realistic types of
construction on the classical model.‖26 The boundary between form and content is in truth rather
porous—it is always a complex, dialectical play of co-implication. Moreover, in order for realism
to adequately represent reality, it is first necessary to apprehend the ways in which the real itself
transforms over time. As Brecht writes:
Were we to copy the style of these realists, we would no longer be realists. For
time flows on, and if it did not, it would be a bad prospect for those who do not
sit at golden tables. Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New
problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to
represent it, modes of representation must also change.27
And yet Lukács insists on the enduring significance of ―universal types‖ as constituting the
aesthetic conditions of possibility for any literary representation of reality. Through his refusal to
accept alternative methods of aesthetic production (e.g. stream-of-consciousness, the interior
monologue, etc.), Lukács has circumscribed the literary subject as an immutable absolute—he has
rendered eternal what certain tendencies of realism have always understood to be temporal,
namely, the form of representation itself. In so doing, Lukács‘s aesthetic strictures have
transformed the immanent forms of literary production into static forms of transcendence. Lukács
can rightly be said to have erected his own condition humaine.
The myopic imputation of modernism‘s ahistorical form fails to recognize the ways in which
the modernists have appropriated specific principles from realism. What does it actually mean to
say that Joyce‘s characters do not ―develop through contact with the world‖ or that they are not
―formed‖ by the world?28 On the contrary, the aesthetic principles of an ―immanent realism‖ are
constantly present in Joyce‘s novels—the fictions he crafts are indeed formally experimental, but
the density of history is never absent from the fabric of stream-of-consciousness that structures
Ulysses. Adorno articulated this point well when he wrote:
Even in Joyce‘s case we do not find the timeless image of man which Lukács
would like to foist on to him, but man as the product of history. For all his Irish
folklore, Joyce does not invoke a mythology beyond the world he depicts, but
instead strives to mythologize it, i.e., to create its essence, whether benign or
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maleficent, by applying the technique of stylization so despised by the Lukács of
today.29
Joyce‘s Ulysses is in fact thoroughly in the dialogically rich and saturated images of
historicized forms of modern alienation. On the one hand, the novel upholds the creative form of
the interior monologue, and yet at the same time it nonetheless manages to capture the way in
which such interior forms are mediated by the immanently present conditions of history. There is
in Ulysses the recognition of the historical constitution of the modern, alienated condition—as
Stephen Dedalus famously announces in Ulysses: history ―is a nightmare from which I am trying
to awake.‖30 This is why Joyce‘s modernism is not indicative of an anti-realist break tout court—
the ―voice of the age echoes through‖31 his monologues—and it is a voice that recognizes and
affirms the deep strata of its own historicity.32
The attempt to jettison the modernist doxa in the name of defending the tradition of realism
betrays an illegitimate circumscription of the modernist subject as a timeless form. Lukács‘s
critique is therefore a double failure—on the one hand, he mistakes the concretely historical
forms of modernism for ahistorical abstractions, and on the other hand he transforms the
dynamic, immanently variegated forms of realism into static forms of transcendence. In failing to
recognize the aesthetic production of the immanently constituted structure of literary realism,
Lukács finally dissolves the boundaries of subjectivity he constantly strives to maintain. In the
final analysis, his ideological intervention fails to penetrate the surface of his literary objects—his
desire to preserve enduring types within literature, as well as the primacy of the Aristotelian
determination of man as a zoon politikon, is grounded in the absolutization of concrete
potentiality. Immanent realism, by contrast, preserves the dialectical movement between
subjectivity and objective reality—a movement that is always temporally structured by the
dynamic socio-historical conditions of a determinate life-world.
CHARLES PRUSIK
Villanova University
EMAIL: [email protected]
Georg Lukács, ―The Ideology of Modernism,‖ in Realism in Our Time: Literature and Class Struggle,
trans. John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971).
2
Ibid., 17.
3
Ibid., 19.
4
Ibid., 20.
5
Ibid., 20–21.
6
Ibid., 21. It is worth noting that Lukács‘s use of Heidegger is disputable. While it is true in Being and
Time that Dasein is ―thrown,‖ such thrownness does not preclude the factical structures of ―being-in‖ and
―being-with‖ that constitute the existentiality of Dasein as always already ―being-in-the-world.‖ See Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, (New York: The State University of New York Press,
2010), 53–66.
7
Lukács, ―The Ideology of Modernism,‖ 24.
8
Ibid., 24.
9
Ibid., 25.
10
Ibid., 26.
11
Ibid., 34.
12
It is worth noting that Lukács‘s understanding of the ―selective principle‖ is far from new. On the
contrary, the necessity of such a principle has been evoked since the earliest periods of realism. See for
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instance, Guy de Maupassant‘s preface to The Novel in Pierre et Jean: ―The realist, if he is an artist, will
not try to show us a banal photograph of life, but to provide us with a vision that is at once more complete,
more startling, and more convincing than reality itself. To recount everything would be impossible, for it
would require at least a volume a day to list the magnitude of insignificant incidents that fill our
lives…This is why the artist, having chosen his theme, will select from such a life cluttered with random
and trivial events only those characteristic details useful to his subject, and will reject all the rest as
superfluous.‖ See Guy de Maupassant, ―The Novel‖ in Pierre et Jean, trans. Julie Mead (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 7–8.
13
Lukács, ―The Ideology of Modernism,‖ 39.
14
Georg Lukács, ―Realism in the Balance‖ in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso,
2007), 33.
15
Ibid.
16
Within the twentieth century, Lukács primarily affirms authors such as Mann and Gorky, who are said to
continue and develop the realist tradition. See ―Realism in the Balance,‖ 45.
17
Ibid., 35.
18
Ibid., 46.
19
See Lukács, ―The Ideology of Modernism,‖ 31.
20
Ibid.
21
It is beyond the present scope of the essay to explicate Lukács‘s Hegelian presentation of the genesis of
the modern novel as it has emerged dialectically from epic lyric poetry and its canon of heroes. For an
extended articulation of this development, see Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historicophilosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bastock (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1971), 56–93.
22
Lukács, ―The Ideology of Modernism,‖ 18.
23
Adorno is quite right when he writes the following: ―What looks like formalism to him, really means the
structuring elements of a work in accordance with laws appropriate to them, and is relevant to that
‗immanent meaning‘ for which Lukács yearns, as opposed to a meaning arbitrarily superimposed from
outside, something he objectively defends while asserting its impossibility.‖ See Theodor Adorno,
―Reconciliation under Duress,‖ in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 2007), 168.
24
Ibid.
25
Bertolt Brecht, ―Against Georg Lukács,‖ in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso,
2007), 74.
26
Ibid., 70.
27
Ibid., 87.
28
Lukács, ―The Ideology of Modernism,‖ 21.
29
Adorno, ―Reconciliation under Duress,‖ 174.
30
See James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990), 34. Although Lukács at times suggests that the
modern ―nihilism‖ which constitutes the weltanschauung of modernists such as Joyce and Kafka,
contributed to the ideological development of twentieth century Fascism and Nazism (see Lukács, ―The
Ideology of Modernism,‖ 63), Joyce‘s Ulysses reflects an acute awareness of the increasing symptoms of
anti-Semitism in Europe. Take for instance, the conversation between Dedalus and Mr. Deasy in episode
two of Ulysses: ―—Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the jews. In all the
highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation‘s decay. Wherever they gather they
eat up the nation‘s vital strength. I have seen it coming the years. As sure as we are standing here the jew
merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is Dying,‖ 33.
31
See Adorno, ―Reconciliation under Duress,‖ 174.
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While it is more than likely that Lukács‘ reading of Ulysses is obstructed by a significant language
barrier, the almost total absence of any linguistic analysis of the text is indefensible. One could, for
instance, critique Ulysses on realist grounds insofar as Joyce‘s deployment of specific dialects is (at times),
unrealistic. See for example, Anthony Burgess‘ erudite study of Joyce‘s language, Joysprick, in which he
discusses questions of dialect, particularly with respect to Molly‘s monologue: ―Joyce has established on
her [Molly‘s] very first appearance that she has no education. ‗It must have fell down,‘ she says, and ‗Tell
us in plain words.‘ But the implied lower-class Dublin speech does not fit with her declared background.
Her father was a major in the Gibraltar garrison and her mother was Spanish…Molly would grow up
speaking Andalusian Spanish (Joyce makes her approach it as though a Hugo grammar) and a kind of
pseudo-patrician English imposed by her father‘s position in a closed and highly snobbish garrison society.
Coming to Dublin as a young woman she would be unlikely to relinquish a sort of ruling class accent and
idiom.‖ See Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 33.
32
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